Towards the end of summer, when the taut white sheet of the sky begins to flag in the evenings, creasing in the middle to allow a grey cloud or two to appear, my body begins to prepare for something. It is my annual season of moulting. I cry a lot (usually, my birthday has gone by not so long ago and I am feeling decades older); I moon around the house with a long face; even my books begin to linger on the nightstand unread.
And then the rains come.
While Kalidasa’s heroines would have prepared for love right about now (those creatures were pretty obsessed, let me tell you, discussing nail marks and love bites all the time), I go in the opposite direction. All of a sudden, I begin to read books about food.
Like, I "pour" over these books, getting really hungry in the middle of the night and waking the spouse up so we can huddle in the kitchen, foraging for food. Cookbooks, memoirs, books on food and philosophy, old magazines with tips that seemed radical for the time, second-hand tomes with brown pages and gorgeously lurid pictures (think of the fat Good Housekeeping books from the fifties). As clouds gather, the phase gets into its most intense and creepy avatar yet and I call in reinforcements – Bengali books from Kolkata that my mother couriers.
In my teens, the urge to turn over a new leaf came with haircuts and clothes shopping; in my twenties, it was always about gargantuan cleaning sprees. Ever since I turned thirty, the urge to turn over a new leaf has always come with a certain predilection for cooking, or at least to wanting to want to cook as the rain pounds outside turning dust to a redolent clayey mess.
In case you suffer from this curious disease too, I have compiled a handy list of all kinds of food books for you to read this monsoon. You could enjoy them any way you like but our tip is this: call in sick first.
Rom-Com meets Kitchen Chronicles: My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss
Luisa Weiss, the author of the charming blog The Wednesday Chef, has the perfect publishing job in New York, a lovely flat on the Upper West Side and a sparkly engagement ring. Yet, there is something missing. As a half-Italian, half-American child who spent a memorable childhood in Berlin, she grew up feeling ever-divided, always pining for Berlin. Then, one day, she decided to give the alternate life in her head a chance: move to Berlin to cook and work on a book.
Beautifully written, filled with offbeat recipes, suffused with the lights, sounds and flavours of all the different places she has ever lived in (there was even a year in Paris), it is almost a handbook on how to write movingly of memory. My Berlin Kitchen will make you want to document your kitchen chronicles for sure.
(If you really really like this genre, and must must read something similar immediately, then you may as well attempt Lunch in Paris: A Love Story With Recipes by Elizabeth Bard.)
(Western) Philosophy encounters Food: The Virtues of the Table by Julian Baggini
“When I first had the idea of talking about the connection between cheese and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, I thought the conjunction of the two would be unprecedented. This, after all, was the writer of The Critique of Pure Reason, not pure Boursin, and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, not mozzarella. What I didn’t know is that cheese and Kant are already linked, and not in a good way.”
So begins Baggini’s fascinating book. It has a fair amount of philosophy, but worn ever so lightly, and divided into slim chapters that remind you, as it happens, of very thinly sliced smoked cheese. It has anecdotes and debates – ranging from ethics to aesthetics – and it even has fantastic recipes. What Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie does to philosophy and crime, Baggini’s touch brings to food: a gentle wisdom, a taste of good wine, good sense, good conversation, and most importantly, a lesson or two on being a good sport.
Meet the Yummy Mummy: The Bong Mom’s Cookbook by Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta
In a way, this is sort of a sequel genre to ‘rom-com meets kitchen chronicles’, and let me tell you, Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta’s book is just as comforting as a meal cooked by one’s Mum and eaten at her familiar table after many months. After her eldest daughter was born, Sandeepa wanted to recreate the scents and sounds of her grandmother’s north Calcutta kitchen in her suburban American home – and embarked upon a culinary journey that is as poignant as it is funny, and as inward-looking as it is social (Sandeepa’s eponymous blog had a huge readership). Whether you want to learn how to make dim kosha – her mother in law’s secret recipe – or the perfect way to roll triangular parathas, or you simply want to instinctively imbibe how to pass on oral history to your children, this is your book.
Erotic food memoir, anyone? Insatiable by Gael Greene
“For me, the two greatest discoveries of the twentieth century were the Cuisinart and the clitoris.”
Long before Buzzfeed made them cool, Gael Greene was writing clever articles with such titles: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Icecream But Were Too Fat To Ask. It was 1968, a time when Americans ate with the sophistication of bumpkins when Greene emerged as the pioneering American food writer (she became New York magazine’s restaurant critic in the fall of 1968 and remained till 2002).
Much fame later, Greene authored two erotic novels Blue Skies, No Candy and Doctor Love which went on to be NYT bestsellers. Now Insatiable, her ‘tales’ from a ‘life of delicious excess’ combines her erotic adventures with her culinary ones, and is a book packed with action – and recipes. A unique food memoir if there was one.
The Jeeves Angle: A Butler’s Guide to Entertaining At Home by Nicholas Clayton
If you’ve had enough of delicious excesses, then I’d recommend this slim little book. It tells you how to host everything, from a cricket tea to a barbeque to a fancy sit-down dinner, with the sort of unflappable stiff upper lip grace of a quintessential English-I’ve-saved-your-arse-a-hundred-times-already-but-let’s-not-talk-of-it-it’s-in-poor-taste butler.
Nicholas Clayton has been a butler for a long time and knows everything about everything. But he will, mind you, tell you only what you have earned. He tells you that while the debate on whether it is called scone like sloan or scone like Don has not yet been decided either way, you cannot throw a classic cream tea without scones. This is the menu of a classic cream tea – and not anything else these fancy shmancy modern books might be saying:
Two warm scones
Clotted cream
Strawberry jam
A pot of tea
Murder and Dessert: Key Lime Pie Murder by Joanne Fluke
Meet Hannah Swensen. She owns a cookie shop in a small town in Minnesota where everyone knows everyone, is wooed by two handsome men between whom she cannot choose, and is driven batty by her mother. In between all this though, she solves murders.
These cozy mysteries have so many delicious recipes thrown in that just reading them will make your trousers feel tighter at the waist. Key Lime Pie Murder is my favourite because it’s the first of the series I encountered – randomly at the book fair – and the only way one can buy them now is to order online. But apparently all the books are filled with delicious recipes, including, of course, a fabulous starring recipe that is the title. So feel free to take your pick from among Cherry Cheesecake Murder, Cream Puff Murder, Apple Turnover Murder or Blackberry Pie Murder! They’re gorily delicious.
Devapriya Roy’s newest book The Heat And Dust Project: A Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat, co-written with husband Saurav Jha, has, among other deep and meaningful things, some angsting about cake.
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And then the rains come.
While Kalidasa’s heroines would have prepared for love right about now (those creatures were pretty obsessed, let me tell you, discussing nail marks and love bites all the time), I go in the opposite direction. All of a sudden, I begin to read books about food.
Like, I "pour" over these books, getting really hungry in the middle of the night and waking the spouse up so we can huddle in the kitchen, foraging for food. Cookbooks, memoirs, books on food and philosophy, old magazines with tips that seemed radical for the time, second-hand tomes with brown pages and gorgeously lurid pictures (think of the fat Good Housekeeping books from the fifties). As clouds gather, the phase gets into its most intense and creepy avatar yet and I call in reinforcements – Bengali books from Kolkata that my mother couriers.
In my teens, the urge to turn over a new leaf came with haircuts and clothes shopping; in my twenties, it was always about gargantuan cleaning sprees. Ever since I turned thirty, the urge to turn over a new leaf has always come with a certain predilection for cooking, or at least to wanting to want to cook as the rain pounds outside turning dust to a redolent clayey mess.
In case you suffer from this curious disease too, I have compiled a handy list of all kinds of food books for you to read this monsoon. You could enjoy them any way you like but our tip is this: call in sick first.
Rom-Com meets Kitchen Chronicles: My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss
Luisa Weiss, the author of the charming blog The Wednesday Chef, has the perfect publishing job in New York, a lovely flat on the Upper West Side and a sparkly engagement ring. Yet, there is something missing. As a half-Italian, half-American child who spent a memorable childhood in Berlin, she grew up feeling ever-divided, always pining for Berlin. Then, one day, she decided to give the alternate life in her head a chance: move to Berlin to cook and work on a book.
Beautifully written, filled with offbeat recipes, suffused with the lights, sounds and flavours of all the different places she has ever lived in (there was even a year in Paris), it is almost a handbook on how to write movingly of memory. My Berlin Kitchen will make you want to document your kitchen chronicles for sure.
(If you really really like this genre, and must must read something similar immediately, then you may as well attempt Lunch in Paris: A Love Story With Recipes by Elizabeth Bard.)
(Western) Philosophy encounters Food: The Virtues of the Table by Julian Baggini
“When I first had the idea of talking about the connection between cheese and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, I thought the conjunction of the two would be unprecedented. This, after all, was the writer of The Critique of Pure Reason, not pure Boursin, and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, not mozzarella. What I didn’t know is that cheese and Kant are already linked, and not in a good way.”
So begins Baggini’s fascinating book. It has a fair amount of philosophy, but worn ever so lightly, and divided into slim chapters that remind you, as it happens, of very thinly sliced smoked cheese. It has anecdotes and debates – ranging from ethics to aesthetics – and it even has fantastic recipes. What Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie does to philosophy and crime, Baggini’s touch brings to food: a gentle wisdom, a taste of good wine, good sense, good conversation, and most importantly, a lesson or two on being a good sport.
Meet the Yummy Mummy: The Bong Mom’s Cookbook by Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta
In a way, this is sort of a sequel genre to ‘rom-com meets kitchen chronicles’, and let me tell you, Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta’s book is just as comforting as a meal cooked by one’s Mum and eaten at her familiar table after many months. After her eldest daughter was born, Sandeepa wanted to recreate the scents and sounds of her grandmother’s north Calcutta kitchen in her suburban American home – and embarked upon a culinary journey that is as poignant as it is funny, and as inward-looking as it is social (Sandeepa’s eponymous blog had a huge readership). Whether you want to learn how to make dim kosha – her mother in law’s secret recipe – or the perfect way to roll triangular parathas, or you simply want to instinctively imbibe how to pass on oral history to your children, this is your book.
Erotic food memoir, anyone? Insatiable by Gael Greene
“For me, the two greatest discoveries of the twentieth century were the Cuisinart and the clitoris.”
Long before Buzzfeed made them cool, Gael Greene was writing clever articles with such titles: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Icecream But Were Too Fat To Ask. It was 1968, a time when Americans ate with the sophistication of bumpkins when Greene emerged as the pioneering American food writer (she became New York magazine’s restaurant critic in the fall of 1968 and remained till 2002).
Much fame later, Greene authored two erotic novels Blue Skies, No Candy and Doctor Love which went on to be NYT bestsellers. Now Insatiable, her ‘tales’ from a ‘life of delicious excess’ combines her erotic adventures with her culinary ones, and is a book packed with action – and recipes. A unique food memoir if there was one.
The Jeeves Angle: A Butler’s Guide to Entertaining At Home by Nicholas Clayton
If you’ve had enough of delicious excesses, then I’d recommend this slim little book. It tells you how to host everything, from a cricket tea to a barbeque to a fancy sit-down dinner, with the sort of unflappable stiff upper lip grace of a quintessential English-I’ve-saved-your-arse-a-hundred-times-already-but-let’s-not-talk-of-it-it’s-in-poor-taste butler.
Nicholas Clayton has been a butler for a long time and knows everything about everything. But he will, mind you, tell you only what you have earned. He tells you that while the debate on whether it is called scone like sloan or scone like Don has not yet been decided either way, you cannot throw a classic cream tea without scones. This is the menu of a classic cream tea – and not anything else these fancy shmancy modern books might be saying:
Two warm scones
Clotted cream
Strawberry jam
A pot of tea
Murder and Dessert: Key Lime Pie Murder by Joanne Fluke
Meet Hannah Swensen. She owns a cookie shop in a small town in Minnesota where everyone knows everyone, is wooed by two handsome men between whom she cannot choose, and is driven batty by her mother. In between all this though, she solves murders.
These cozy mysteries have so many delicious recipes thrown in that just reading them will make your trousers feel tighter at the waist. Key Lime Pie Murder is my favourite because it’s the first of the series I encountered – randomly at the book fair – and the only way one can buy them now is to order online. But apparently all the books are filled with delicious recipes, including, of course, a fabulous starring recipe that is the title. So feel free to take your pick from among Cherry Cheesecake Murder, Cream Puff Murder, Apple Turnover Murder or Blackberry Pie Murder! They’re gorily delicious.
Devapriya Roy’s newest book The Heat And Dust Project: A Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat, co-written with husband Saurav Jha, has, among other deep and meaningful things, some angsting about cake.